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Listen
in as CosmiKids™ founder Judy Williams speaks to today’s
leading futurists about what’s next in soulful education for our
youth.
Barbara Marx Hubbard is a noted futurist, author, and public speaker.
She is president of the Foundation for Conscious Evolution. One of the
co-founding board members of the World Future Society, her books include:
The Hunger of Eve, The Evolutionary Journey, The Revelation, Conscious
Evolution and Emergence. In the 1970’s she co-founded The Committee
for the Future, co-designing twenty-five SYNCON (SYNergistic CONvening)
conferences to find win-win solutions in light of our new potentials.
She also wrote and narrated “The Theatre for the Future”,
a multimedia story of creation with a vision for our long-range future.
In the 1980s she presented a 14-part television series, Potentials,
interviewing some of our greatest futurists including Buckminster Fuller,
Norman Cousins, Gene Roddenberry, Willis Harman and others. (This series
is now available on home video.) In 1984 her name was placed in nomination
for the vice presidency of the United States on the Democratic ticket.
She also co-designed three major Soviet-American citizen summits during
the 1980s Hubbard graduated cum laude from Bryn Mawr College with a
B.A in Political Science. She also studied at L’Ecole des Sciences
Politiques and the Sorbonne in Paris. She has five children and five
grandchildren and lives in Santa Barbara, California.
BMH:
Hi there, it’s Barbara!
JW: Hi Barbara! Is it as beautiful in Santa Barbara as it is in San
Diego today?
BMH: Yes, it’s beautiful here today.
JW: Thank you so much for the time to talk. It’s great to reacquaint
myself over the phone to you. You and I had met a while ago and discussed
some aspects of your book, Conscious Evolution, and how elements in
it might be distilled and refashioned for children to understand. The
“Rings of Empowerment” activities for CosmiKids came out of
that discussion. Can you tell me a little more about how the developmental
path to becoming a fully creative individual and one’s dharma figures
into what you feel are the current needs of our education system?
BMH: I think the purpose of education is to awaken each person to
that creative essence within themselves, that spark of spirit; and cultivate
and nurture it until it finds it’s life purpose and how to express
itself in creative action in the world. One’s vocation and life
purpose is the link between the inner potential and the outer world.
Education (Educare - to lead one forth) is to bring forth that creative
potential in expression in the world. This is important in many ways:
first of all, for the growth of the individual child or person. We grow
when we find that potential and express it creatively and meaningfully
in the world. If we suppress our potential or don’t know we have
it or never find what our life purpose is, we’re going to be less
than we can truly be. It is also true because the world itself is in
such great need of our creativity, our innovation, and our new possibilities,
that every single person is needed to bring forth that which is in them
to add to/to heal and to evolve our world.
JW: That’s beautiful, Barbara. There are so many more threads to
the rich tapestry that you’ve woven in all your works, including
Emergence and the Gateway Program, to name a few. How might you envision
your body of work blending with what’s next in soulful education
for our youth?
BMH: I think it belongs with youth. It’s one thing for us older
folks to realize the potential of ourselves to create a future, but
the ones who are going to do it are the children. I think it’s
vital that every child knows that he or she is part of the great story
of creation. That story has been going on for billions and billions
of years and it is just now becoming obvious that each of us is a participant
in that creation. There is a tendency in the process of creation to
create greater harmony, greater consciousness, and greater freedom.
We can see it from single-cells to animals to humans to the great spiritual
leaders of our species and to ourselves. What we want every child to
know is that they are part of this vast process and that each of them,
by there own creativity is being called to participate. By participating,
they are going to help create a world equal to one that they would like
to live in.
JW: Wonderfully said, Barbara. I am currently involved in your online
Gateway to Conscious Evolution Program. In the program, I feel at times
like a child myself, learning so much about the vast, living universe
and how I play a vital role in its evolvement. I wish I had I known
more deeply about my role in creation at a younger stage of my life.
BMH: You know, Judy, from the point of view of creating our future,
we are all very young. It doesn’t matter if we are eight or eighty.
We are all standing together on a new threshold. The world is at a point
of transformation. The very generation that the children are in now,
in the next twenty or thirty years, when they will be adults, will have
made a shift either towards greater breakdown, life support systems,
environmental collapse, or we will have made a shift towards a more
cooperative and sustainable world. I really think it will happen in
this generation.
JW: As we’ve talked about during and within the Gateway Program
and with some of the great speakers that you have in that program, we’re
truly in that birthing and emergence process as a species now.
BMH: I’m seventy-three. I was born before any of this was obvious.
But the children have all been born after the nuclear age, after the
space age; in the age of Internet and mass communications and weapons
of mass destruction. They all know that this world is an interconnected,
living system that we could destroy. Or, we could make the conscious
choice to evolve. They know this deep in their hearts, even if they
don’t use those words. So often education doesn’t take
into account the fact that we are evolving. I think that one thing that
happens to the young is that they get bored, they get sick and they
get violent. Because something in them is pressing them to express and
participate more fully in the creation of life itself. But unfortunately,
that’s not what education is about. Education often turns children
away from their creativity into more overly structured roles.
JW: That offers an interesting framework within which to view the level
of violence in the schools today. We can see the disinterest and feel
the disillusionment on the part of teachers within a system that is
slowly disintegrating.
BMH: I think part of the violence in the young is suppressed creativity.
Lack of purpose and lack of support for them to be who they are. There’s
a beautiful phrase in the Gospel according to Thomas, ”If you give
forth that which is within you, what you give forth will save you. If
you don’t give forth that which is within you, that which is within
you will destroy you.” If you are stuck in a school where you are
not being nurtured to give forth that creativity and to know that you
are needed, then human nature is such that you will either get depressed,
violent, sick or addicted.
JW: When you were younger and in school did you have any thoughts along
these lines? What part of your education process resonated within you
most?
BMH: I had a wonderful education as a young child at Dalton School in
New York, which was a progressive school. We used to get assignments
each month and we could work at our own pace. If you finished early
you could do Greek dancing for three weeks. I had a great time! I left
there and went to a “normal” school in Westche, which I never
liked.
I went to Bryn Mawr College. I think my real distress came when I entered
college. It is an excellent institution. I looked over all the courses
and subjects and I didn’t know which one to take because I had
no idea what my purpose was! I had no idea what I was on this earth
to do. Or, what the purpose of life in general was. So, I was going
around and asking professors what they felt was the purpose of human
civilization, where are we going and what’s my part in it? You
couldn’t ask the question in any class, so stopped going to classes
and read in my room. I read all the philosophers.
I took my junior year abroad in Paris and I went to the Sorbonne and
L’Ecole des Sciences Politiques. Even at the Sorbonne, they were
repeating themselves over and over again. I remember at that time that
I tried to be an existentialist. I put on the beret, smoked the cigarettes,
drank the red wine. I felt sick!
I met
an artist over there, Earl Hubbard, and I was alone one day at lunch
and he sat opposite of me. I was always asking people, “What is
your purpose? Where are we going? Why are you here on this earth? ”
He said, “I am an artist and I am seeking a new image of man commensurate
with our powers to shape the future.” I instantly fell in love
with him and married him. We started on this search for images of the
future which were positive and for a sense of direction that we might
be going in. It was really through my marriage and having five children
that I began to discover that we are born at a time when our species
is evolving and we are given powers that we used to call God’s.
That conscious evolution is actually becoming aware of the way evolution
works and working directly with it to co-create the future we choose.
I began to develop this whole new world view called conscious evolution
through my marriage and my personal search.
JW: When you talk about a spiritual partnership, that’s truly what
we’re evolving into with respect to marriage and intimate relationships
in today’s world.
BMH: The first part of my marriage, I had no idea I had a vocation other
than being a wife and mother. Although I was a very devoted wife and
mother, I began to feel depressed. I didn’t understand it until
I read Abraham Maslow and Betty Friedan. Maslow said every joyful, productive
person has one thing in common, chosen work that they find intrinsically
self-rewarding. I realized that I had not found my vocation. I had my
children, and I had my husband, but that was not my vocation. Betty
Friedan, in her book, The Feminine Mystique, pointed out that so many
women were suffering from “the problem”, which is that they
felt they had some identity beyond wife and mother. When I found my
identity, I found my vocation, it wasn’t until my mid-thirties
that I realized that I had a part to play over and beyond reproducing
the species and taking care of my husband.
This then affected my children. One of my children said that I had transformed
from a cave-age woman to a space-age women in six months. What happened
to them from the point of education, is that when the mother or father
becomes future-oriented and positively engaged, realizing they can have
some effect on making a more positive future, they affect their children
deeply. The children know that for themselves. The deepest way we learn
is by example from our elders. This points to the idea that it is important
for teachers to be given the opportunity to be that themselves.
The teacher has to have experienced the sense that the world is at a
crisis point and that it could go toward a positive future and that
everyone has a role to play, including the teacher. If they were given
information from the best thinkers and writers on this subject, most
of which are not studied in school or in academic institutions, then
teachers would be spontaneously empowered to be guides to the young.
JW: What do you think about teachers that aren’t on their own spiritual
path or whose values are not aligned with a co-creative universe model?
How is it that these educators would have the knowingness to teach and
model these deeper aspects of being and growth?
BMH: You know, Judy like everything new, it’s not everyone at once.
There are always pioneers. Look at yourself. How many are there like
you? We don’t know that until a person like you stands up and says,
“I’ve put up a flag. How many others out there that are teachers
would like to explore and develop a creative curriculum for positive
futures?” Once you put up the flag, you’ll find that there
are many people. But, if they are never asked and there is no gathering
of them. They get buried. Sometimes, buried alive.
JW: That’s one of the goals with the Transformational Education
Network within The Chopra Foundation’s Alliance for the New Humanity
(www.theallianceforthenewhumanity.org) To bring together like-minded
educational systems, people and organizations to co-create an educational
paradigm that works for our emerging species. Barbara, what are you
working on currently on that might offer some insights for a transformational
educational process?
BMH: We’re working on The Synergy Center Peace Room, which is
in the Gateway Program. To create a space were people can identify the
best innovations and projects now changing the world, put their own
projects in there and find teammates and partners. Part of the educational
program, whether you be a child or an adult, is to find out what you
want to do and find out who else wants to do it with you and join together
to be more co-creative.
JW: I loved your children’s idea of A.C.E., Agents for Conscious
Evolution. Where children could join together with pen pals across the
globe and co-create projects to make the world a better place.
BMH: The children could do that through our website, www.consciousevolution.net.
We would also like to develop a Gateway program for children. One of
my goals would be to meet teachers who are interested in this. And to
work together to develop an internet-based curriculum to connect children
with the most innovative, creative people and with each other world-wide.
JW: What advice do you have for parents and educators that they might
start on the path of transformational education today, in their homes,
schools and communities? How about five practical tips?
BMH: First: I would say take some time, free time and get in touch
with your own deepest intuition about what you really want to do in
the world. You know that phrase, follow your bliss? Take some time,
pay attention. If you feel frustrated, anxious, depressed, or attracted,
see what it is that you are being attracted toward.
Second: Spend some time allowing that attraction to give you some guidance,
like read this book, go to this meeting, call up this person. See if
you can find a couple of other people who are excited about what you’re
excited about.
Third: Form a small group and take some time to share your vision about
what you really want to do. This begins to awaken you to your emerging
potential.
Fourth: Check into the Evolve website and the Synergy Center Peace Room
to get a sense of what’s happening in the world that might attract
you to participate in. So that you don’t get left out, feeling
isolated.
Fifth: Read Conscious Evolution and Emergence, along with many other
important books, to understand a comprehensive worldview and a personal
way of getting in touch with your own personal essence.
JW: Thank you, Barbara. My heart goes out to you in thanks for your
insights and shared thoughts. I will visit you soon in the Gateway to
Conscious Evolution.
BMW: Bye-bye, Judy.
©
2003 Judy Williams
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